You know, he (Winogrand) set a tempo on the street so strong that it was impossible not to follow it. It was like jazz. You just had to get in the same groove... You know, if you hesitate, forget it. You don't have to learn to unleash that. It was like having a hair trigger. Sometimes walking down the street, wanting to make a picture, I would be so anticipatory, so anxious, that I would just have to fire the camera, to let fly a picture, in order to release the
energy, so that I could recock it. That's what you got from Garry. It came off him in waves - to be keyed up, eager, excited for pictures in that way.
- Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander : A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck, Joel Meyerowitz
, ISBN: 0821227262

...Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
- Joel Meyerowitz - Sunday Times book of creative photography.

'Tough' meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn’t be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.
- Joel Meyerowitz

They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to someting, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.
- Joel Meyerowitz, Visions and Images : American Photographers on Photography by Barbaralee Diamonstein , Page: 112

What I think is so extraordinary about the photograph is that we have a piece of paper with this image adhered to it, etched on it, which interposes itself into the plane of time that we are actually in at that moment. Even if it comes from as far back as 150 years ago, or as recently as yesterday, or a minute before as a Polaroid color photograph, suddenly you bring it into your experience. You look at it, and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.
- Joel Meyerowitz

I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it--stones and buildings and trees and air--but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.
- Joel Meyerowitz

What is the art experience about? Really, I'm not interested in making "Art" at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word "Art", it's almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.
- Joel Meyerowitz - A Conversation: Bruce K. Macdonald with Joel Meyerowitz, July 22-26, 1977 (Cape Cod)

Making any statement of your feelings is risky. It's just like making pictures.
- Joel Meyerowitz - A Conversation: Bruce K. Macdonald with Joel Meyerowitz, July 22-26, 1977 (Cape Cod)

I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are ... a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
- Joel Meyerowitz, 1000 Photo Icons by Anthony Bannon (Foreword), George Eastman House , ISBN: 3822820970 , Page: 666

I have been asked so many times: "How do you know when to take a photograph?"
And I remember walking through Paris, and just walking down the street and suddenly smell baking croissants on the air, butter and sugar.
and you oh, and you immediately - you want a corssoiante or a cookie or something right?
And then you take two steps and it is gone!
So in the air, on the street was this little zone, for a moment, where the fragance was so rich and compelling...
To me, that is what photography is:
you walk along the street and something happens, and you get it
it is a visual that is as precise as that fragance that is only in the air of the doorway.
- Joel Meyerowitz

Colour plays itself out along a richer band of feelings: more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation.
- Joel Meyerowitz - Photography Masterclass: Creative Techniques of 100 Great Photographers [Paul Lowe] foreword by Simon Norfolk

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
- Joel Meyerowitz

For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that’s one thing the world has in abundance, and I am just passing through it with my snare. My camera is a snare. I can throw this sieve out there and I can capture things in it. And risking that gesture all the time is part of the joy of seeing, because I don't have to stretch a canvas, I don’t have to mix the paints, I don’t have to light the studio. I walk around in the world, which is bombarding me with sensations all the time.
- Joel Meyerowitz

On the street each successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters, You take wave after wave, you bathe in it. There is something exciting about being in the crowd, in all that chance and change—its tough out there—but if you can keep paying attention something will reveal itself—just a split second—and then there’s a crazy cockeyed picture.
- Joel Meyerowitz

I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It’s a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. It’s pure philosophy. And poetry.
- Joel Meyerowitz

We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.
- Joel Meyerowitz

Arriving at the rim of this famous landmark, they shuffle about, searching for a sign that says “shoot here.” With one pre-set image labeled GRAND CANYON in their minds, blinding them to what lies below, they search for the one and only “right” spot to stand.
- Joel Meyerowitz

I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.
- Joel Meyerowitz

It’s important when photographing to see different things simultaneously. Because there is so little time in the photographic moment, it must be expanded by consciousness to let in as much as can be contained.
- Joel Meyerowitz

We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, “Oh, look at that.” Maybe it’s nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you’ll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning.
- Joel Meyerowitz

The thought for us [street photographers] was always: “How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant?” And, “Could we really make it live as art?” There was an almost moral dimension.
- Joel Meyerowitz

I think most of us go through our lives partially asleep. Even though our eyes are open and we're out in the world, we're daydreaming or we're distracted in some way. But when I make a photograph of something, at that moment I feel in a very precise, conscious, alert, awakened state, even if it's only for a split-second. And for me that's the joy of photography: to be connected to things in the world that are suddenly of conscious value.
- Joel Meyerowitz - From the book: Photography in 100 Words. David Clark